Jarvis sauntered across the room and took a dirty scrap of paper from beneath a paperweight on the small writing table. It was a misspelled pencil scrawl, signed with Brant’s name, but he did not have to look twice to decide that it was the clumsiest of forgeries, written evidently by some one who had never so much as seen Brant’s handwriting. “Mary, dear,” he said feelingly, “you are a pearl of price, and the mate to you has never been found.” “Be off wid you wid your flatthering tongue!” “It’s not flattery--never a word of it. Did Mrs. Seeley see this letter?” “Sure, she did that same. ’Twas to her that the b’y did be giving it.” “And she gave the boy the suit of clothes it calls for?” “Av coorse she did. And ’tis myself as was wondering fwhat Misther Brant would be wanting wid them ould rags.” “From all our friends--so they be women--good Lord deliver us!” said Jarvis under his breath; then aloud: “That was quite right, of course. Did you happen to see the clothes yourself, Mary?” “I did that; an ould dirty suit of pepper-and-salt it was, the likes of fwhat Misther Brant never did be wearing in the whole swate life av him.” “Exactly.” Jarvis slipped the note into his pocket and got away as quickly as he could. It was but the slenderest thread of a clew, but it spanned one of the many gaps he had been vainly trying for a fortnight to bridge. At the very beginning of his investigation the reporter had stumbled upon Harding’s disguise--the wig and the false beard--in the West Denver _Gasthaus_; and a painstaking inquiry into the habits of the red-haired and fiery-bearded lodger had developed the fact that he was seen often in company with another man whose description Jarvis had gathered from many sources, but whom he was as yet unable to identify. So far as could be ascertained, the unidentified one had disappeared on the night of the tragedy. He had been seen alone at Draco’s in the earlier hours of that night, and he had not been seen by any of Jarvis’s informants since that time. Apart from the overheard conference in Heddrigg’s restaurant--a conference in which Jarvis had long since recognised Harding in his character of red-beard and the unknown man as the two participants--there was nothing to remotely connect the unidentified man with Brant’s affair; nothing, unless the forged letter to Mrs. Seeley might be taken as a connecting link. But just here the reporter’s incomplete knowledge of the facts hampered him. He knew nothing of the papers at which the burglary pointed, and could only guess from the overheard conversation in Heddrigg’s restaurant that the burglar was an emissary of Harding’s. At the finding of the forged letter he had jumped to the conclusion that the house-breaker and Harding’s unknown companion were one and the same person; but cooler after-thought brought doubt, and a leaning toward the William Langford hypothesis.